Wade Errett House

Wade Errett was an early owner of The Standard, a weekly newspaper he purchased in 1894.

Blue Island has a long newspaper and printing history, and as the largest village in the area, Blue Island’s weekly presses supplied the news for neighboring communities.

The first paper printed in Blue Island was the Weekly Herald, started in the spring of 1873, shortly after the village incorporated. At the time Blue Island also supported a local edition of the German-language paper Der Beobachter (The Observer). In these early days farmers paid for their subscription in butter, eggs, and farm produce.

The longest lived newspaper in Blue Island, The Standard traces its roots back to 1876 and was the community’s leading newspaper for 112 years. The paper changed hands several times, and in 1918, facing an extreme shortage of print paper due to the war, merged with John H. Volp’s Saturday Sun to become the Blue Island Sun-Standard. This enterprise lives on in the many local Star newspapers, which were introduced in Blue Island in 1930.